What is Swivel?

Swivel is a website where people share reports of charts and numbers.

Swivel lets people:

• See their numbers visually.
• Understand the numbers through exploration.
• And share that understanding with others.

Swivel helps people find the numbers that drive their lives.

Businesses use Swivel to dashboard their metrics. Newspapers use Swivel to share the statistics behind their stories. Students use Swivel to find and share research data.

Swivel is free for public data, and charges a monthly fee to people who want to use it in private.

Get started now at http://www.swivel.com/.

Our Philosophy

Our mission is to empower the world’s data by helping people turn information into better action.

From the corporate boardroom, to the voting booth, to the fantasy football league, we envision a global community where people can share insights, become more informed, and make smarter decisions.

Product

Swivel is not a data visualization tool. Swivel is not a data analysis tool. Swivel is the world’s first data sharing tool.

Overview

The problem: Businesses run blind. Decision makers often don’t have the numbers they need to do their job.

Swivel’s solution: Swivel makes sharing numbers easy and fun.

In Swivel, numbers are social. Visitors can interact with metrics and share insights for others to see. People can create reports to tell stories, knowing that the data behind the conclusions is a click away.

Since numbers shared in Swivel are always available and extremely approachable, everybody in your organization has easy access to the latest numbers and insights. This increases visibility in your organization, keeps people on the same page, and makes your business smarter.

Details

We know from the hundreds of people we’ve talked to that there are many problems when working with data. Here are some of the biggest.

Problem: It’s hard to get the data: when you need to make a decision, you often have to get the latest report from finance, or ask for IT to pull the new customer numbers out of a database.

Swivel’s solution: Swivel lets IT people pump data directly into Swivel, and it’s just as easy for non–technical people to upload spreadsheets. That means that it’s possible for all an organization’s latest numbers to be found in Swivel.

Problem: If you can get the data in time to make a decision, it’s hard to find what’s affecting the bottom line.

Swivel’s solution: Swivel makes it easy to compare and contrast different views of the data. It’s never been easier to explore.

Problem: When you do discover what’s going on, you often want to share your understanding with others, to check its validity or portray a point.

Swivel’s solution: When you find something interesting, sharing is built right in. You don’t need to create a long appendix of back–up either, everybody can test your assumptions by exploring the data on their own. People truly understand numbers together, by testing assumptions and sharing stories. Swivel is the first tool that works with numbers the way people do.

In summary, Swivel lets people see the data, understand it,and share it, but it doesn’t end there.

In fact, it’s just beginning. It’s a continuous cycle.

When you share Swivel with a colleague, he can use Swivel himself and share it with even more people.

In this way, Swivel’s use organically grows throughout an organization, and the entire business begins to have a metrics driven culture. Just like GE or Google.

Adoption

News Organizations

News organizations love to use Swivel to embed charts and numbers in their articles and blog posts. Here is a sampling of articles that include charts and numbers from Swivel.

	“The not-so-expensive ‘burbs,” September 10, 2009 http://j.mp/swivel-baltimore-sun
	“Ohio’s unemployment rate runs higher than U.S. rate, but Cleveland-Akron area counties do better than the state,” October 8, 2009 http://j.mp/swivel-cleveland
	“Dropouts and prison,” October 10, 2009 http://j.mp/swivel-dispatch
	“Water utilities lack proper filters for weed-killer,” November 4, 2009 http://j.mp/swivel-huffpo
	“Faces of the recession,” http://j.mp/swivel-kitsap
	“On the record: the lobby latest,” December 3, 2009 http://j.mp/swivel-tx-tribune
	“Do elite private colleges discriminate against Asian students?,” October 7, 2009 http://j.mp/swivel-us-news

Education

Future leaders are already being introduced to Swivel through their universities.

	Duke University’s PR department uses Swivel to publicize research results. See the data at: http://www.swivel.com/users/show/1007675.
	John Chambers, creator of the S programming language and Statistics professor at Stanford has recommended Swivel to his students as a place to find numbers on the web.
	“So I’m here at HBS, everyone is forwarding Swivel around as a source for data sets.” — Andrew Hill, Harvard Business School ’10
	Students at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism uses Swivel to create graphs for their articles. See it in action at: http://j.mp/swivel-medill.
	Yale Daily News uses Swivel for graphs in its articles. See it at: http://j.mp/swivel-ydn.

Press

Swivel was mentioned in an article about the beauty of numbers in the Financial Times. From the article, “Brian Mulloy, chief executive of Swivel, says such presentation tools could have many applications for small and medium–sized businesses. For instance, a head of sales might want to add some pizzazz to revenue updates for a far–flung team, or a company’s analyst might want to plot turnover against the weather or some other unusual variable.” http://j.mp/swivel-ft

PCWorld included Swivel in its annual list of 25 Web Sites to watch. From the article, “Data and graph fanatics, you have a home. Swivel, holds a mind–boggling array of charts and graphs–from a line graph illustrating the relationship between wine consumption and crime in the United States over the past 30 years to a pie chart showing the percentage breakdown of bird flu cases in 14 Asian countries. But the site’s most outstanding feature is its ability to integrate different charts containing seemingly unrelated data. Want to compare the national murder rate to the cost of a first–class stamp, or to total hours of media use in U.S. households, over the same period of time? Now you can.” http://j.mp/swivel-pcworld

Gartner included Swivel in their report on Cool Vendors in Analytics, Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management, 2007. From the article: “We picked Swivel as cool, because it is a fun Internet site, trying new approaches to business intelligence which could have valuable business implications. Swivel approaches data like YouTube approaches video. Anyone that enjoys working with data should visit the site to understand the approach that Swivel is taking and think about the potential value for their business role.” http://j.mp/swivel-gartner

Declan Butler of the journal Nature, wrote an article about Swivel and IBM’s Many Eyes in the March 1st, 2007 edition. From the article: “I’m often frustrated by my inability to analyse in a different way data that are printed in peer–reviewed publications, when I’m interested in looking at a relationship that the authors didn’t think of,” [Brent Edwards, director of the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California] says. If research organizations and journals linked the raw data behind papers to social software tools such as Swivel and Many Eyes, he argues, “it would have considerable value to the scientific community as a whole.” http://j.mp/swivel-nature

Michael Prospero at Fast Company wrote an article about Swivel in the March 2007 issue. He and the graphics team there did a cool job telling the story of how Swivel got off the ground. Here’s an excerpt: “Swivel, a new startup, lets users upload, compare, and contrast data—from iPod sales to wine consumption—to make sense of the world.” A Web 2.0 story in charts. http://j.mp/swivel-fastco

Wired mentioned Swivel in one of their playlists. “Imagine our delight at a Web site that not only lets you play with other people’s data but also helps you make your own charts! (Yes, we’re nerds: and that surprises you why?) Upload Excel files or enter your own figures. From there, create a mashup of your data with someone else’s, pick a pretty chart style, and kiss Excel ugliness good–bye.” http://j.mp/swivel-wired